Putin's Witnesses
In the News
•
1h 42m
Directed by Vitaly Mansky • Documentary • 2018 • 102 minutes
On December 31, 1999, Russian president Boris Yeltsin went on live television just before midnight. He announced he was stepping down, and his chosen successor, Vladimir Putin, would take over as acting president. Putin promised a presidential election in three months.
Vitaly Mansky spent the evening filming his family on the eve of the new millennium. They sing and eat candies, but there is worry too. “Words fail me,” Mansky’s wife says at the prospect of Putin as president. She says he is like Mao Zedong—another dictator.
Soon after, Mansky set to work filming Putin and those around him. As a director working for Russian state TV, his purpose was making a film that would boost Putin's electoral success. In PUTIN’S WITNESSES, Mansky—now an acclaimed filmmaker whose credits including the award-winning UNDER THE SUN—looks back at that footage, including much that never made it into his PR project. It serves as a fascinating look at Putin in the earliest days of his presidency, when the seeds of his authoritarianism were already being sown. It also raises difficult questions about the role of Mansky himself. As a filmmaker who witnessed and in some cases shaped these events, is he in some way complicit?
Mansky also directed Gorbachev. Heaven, which finds Gorbachev living alone in an empty house outside Moscow, still carrying the burdens of his past.
Up Next in In the News
-
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here
Directed by Amei Wallach • Documentary • With Ilya Kabakov, Emilia Kabakov, Igoris Markovas, Andrei Monastrysky, Oleg Vassiliev • 2013 • 103 minutes
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here portrays two of Russia’s most celebrated international artists, now American citizens, as they come to terms wi...
-
Branding Illness
Directed by Anne Georget • Documentary • 2011 • 52 minutes
A woman in the grip of pre-menstrual dysphoric disease slams grocery carts outside a supermarket in frustration. A concerned young Japanese woman asks her husband if he has ever been happy. Peppy actors in lab coats reassure the audience...
-
Raising the Floor
Directed by Sabrina Avilés • Documentary • 2022 • 30 minutes
In spring 2020, a global pandemic sent the city of Chelsea, Massachusetts, spiraling into chaos. Chelsea’s frontline workers risked their lives to help others, while its essential workers’ incomes dropped to zero overnight. Hundreds of...